Commission approves $100,000 in COVID funds for health department

In addition to approving this year’s county budgets and salaries, the Hill County Commission Thursday allocated up to $100,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds to the county health department to help its employees keep up with the delta variant-driven surge of COVID-19 in the community.

Hill County Commissioner Diane McLean said the commission received a letter from Hill County Public Health Director Kim Berg requesting the $100,000 to help them bring on more contact tracers and case investigators like they did last year.

Berg has said previously she sent multiple emails to the commission in the past months looking for ARPA funding for this reason but hadn’t gotten a response.

Berg, who is also the county’s health officer, has said the department is buried in work just trying to investigate known cases and haven’t been able to get in touch with everyone who’s been exposed to COVID-19 because there’s not enough hours in the day.

She said Thursday the new case rate in Hill County is already five times what it was at this time last year, and trends suggest it is only going to get worse now that so much of the department’s authority has been curtailed.

The department can no longer issue quarantine orders or even recommendations to people based on their vaccine status due to Montana House Bill 702, which outlaws “discrimination” against the unvaccinated, even if that information is volunteered by the contact.

This put the department in the position of having to either order everyone exposed to quarantine, which is unnecessary for most vaccinated people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and would create more work than the department can physically do, or to cease issuing orders at all and simply recommend people listen to the CDC.

The latter option was reluctantly recommended by Berg in a Hill County Health Board meeting last month and approved by the commission last week.

After Thursday’s meeting she said the department has been asking people to follow CDC guidelines, and they inform people that if they choose to ignore the recommendations they are open to liability if they spread COVID-19, something that has happened with other disease in the past.

“I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that,” she said.

However, Berg said, they’re already getting people openly saying they will not quarantine regardless of what the CDC or the department says.

She said the department is trying to realign their script to address this, and the schools have been good about encouraging students to stay home when sick, but she still hears of a lot of symptomatic people going to school or work regardless.

“If you’re dealing with COVID-19, or measles, or tuberculosis, it doesn’t matter, quarantine is a basic step of public health that we need to take to protect others,” she said.

She said it appears that most who attend work or school despite symptoms aren’t doing it because they don’t trust the health recommendations, but because they feel like they can’t afford to miss it.

Berg said this is the result of a culture that encourages people work even when it’s painful or dangerous and people need to try to deprogram this tendency out of their minds, even when it’s for illnesses other than COVID-19.

She said it’s not only OK to stay home when sick, it’s the responsible thing to do.

She said she hopes her department’s inability to keep people home with quarantine orders doesn’t lead to more COVID-19 spread, but she suspects this fall will be worse than last fall, in part because so few people are wearing masks and large events are being held again.

Berg said during the meeting Thursday that the $100,000 she’s requesting will allow the department to hire temporary contact tracers and case investigators much like last year, helping them keep up with the huge amount of new cases and avoid burnout as more and more come in.

She said local schools have been helping by sending letters to contacts and lightening the workload, now that 90 percent of the departments time is spent just investigating the cases they know of.

She said last year they were able to hire more people thanks to CARES Act funding, but were not able to keep people on as those extra funds were not replaced.

The commission Thursday unanimously approved the allocation.

Berg said the positions in question will likely offer $18 per hour, as they did last year, and anyone who applies will be a huge benefit to the department.

She said she’s hoping to get the postings for the jobs up by today or Monday.

She also mentioned after the meeting that the health department just got this year’s flu vaccine and people in the community should get immunized as soon as possible.

“We’re already seeing more illness in our community than we did last year,” she said. “I mean, we have a bad cold going around, we have strep (throat), pneumonia, and COVID-19, and that’s just what we know of at this point.”